Placerville Residence
Rancho Mirage, California
Building height limitations are fairly restrictive in many parts of the Desert, and at the same time, the market requirement is for very high ceilings. This drove our design composition of overlapping horizontal volumes. The site was fairly steep, which poses a problem for the driveway. We also had the shape of the lot to consider, which was narrow and long, wedged between existing properties to each side. We wanted the house frontage to appear as wide as possible and to keep the house fairly shallow to allow light to penetrate through from the south side, which is the street side. We wound the sloping driveway across the front of the house and created a landscaped berm at the street, which both solved the driveway problem and served to accentuate the width of the property. At the rear, an infinity-edge pool, set in a grassy park, further grounds the house to its mountain-encircled landscape.